Lack of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls) has brightened the outlook for the Saginaw Valley Naval Ship Museum Committee which wants to bring the decommissioned destroyer USS Charles F. Adams to the abandoned Davidson Shipyard as a floating museum. Tests this spring revealed the slip is contaminated with several metals including arsenic, mercury and lead. The arsenic level exceeds that recommended for human contact. Initial tests did not look for the cancer-causing chemicals once used as fire retardants in industrial applications. A second round of tests failed to detect PCBs. The committee is seeking some of the money left over from the Saginaw River dredging project, funded by a $28.2 million lawsuit settlement reached in 1998. The tribe and federal and state governments sued General Motors Corp. And the cities of Bay City and Saginaw over PCB contamination in the river and Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay. That job was completed July 22 for $9.7 million, freeing up between $1 million and $2 million for monitoring dredging results and other environmental projects. Committee members said they would still try to get funding to clean up the slip in Veterans Memorial Park, owned by Bay City.
